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Comment by kurtextrem | Hacker News Reader

This is a clever trick (using mousedown to trigger a click), but breaks drag & dropping links, drag & dropping links to new tabs. and there is also a thing I tend to do: If I notice I pressed the mouse button down on the wrong link, I move the cursor away from that link and let the button go up on the correct or in free space, so the browser doesn't navigate (not sure how common this behaviour is, though)

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Regarding clicking on the wrong link, then moving the cursor away and releasing the button, I do this often as well.

On Twitter just accidentally clicking down on the mouse anywhere, I have to move my mouse outside of the browser window before releasing it because anywhere else is likely to have side effects.

Same. But then I often right-click and select open in an incognito window

> I move the cursor away from that link and let the button go up on the correct or in free space

I do this a lot as well.

Yep I think a lot of users might be quite annoye, if they didn't have the reverse out of a click option.

Didn’t think of drag and dropping links to new tabs! Yeah, that’s a bit of a sad regression.

The two other use cases you mention aren’t common at all though.

Realizing midway I clicked in the wrong place is very common for me.

just want to hop on the bandwagon that I also regularly move away from a clicked link after noticing the mistake.

It's extremely common. It is unclear to me if the mousedown event just kicks off preloading of the page, or actually forces you to navigate to the page. If it's the latter, you are breaking decades of mouse ux changing a click from a mousedown followed by mouseup.

It's the latter - it's in use on all links on their sidebar.

Dragging sidebar links worked fine for me all but once in Safari. Not sure how to tell whether it's actually being used, but I don't notice any problems.

[Edit: I was using a blocker that was blocking it. Now I've used it and can tell it's working, and I still don't notice any problems using it in Safari.]

It doesn’t work in Safari. https://instant.page/tech

> Safari 13.0 has support for <link rel="prefetch"> but it’s disabled by default. Hopefully it will be enabled in September 2020 in Safari 14.0.

Try enabling that setting or using another browser (I used Firefox) to see the effect it has.

+1 I do those as well. Never really thought about how common it could be, but it is pretty natural for me to drag the mouse and let it up somewhere else to prevent incorrect navigation.

It’s common enough to be damn inconvenient if the ability just suddenly disappears.

If it happens on all sites at the same time it’s one thing. If it happens on just your site I will just feel like your site is icky (and I might not even know why).

Chiming in just to say that I do this too and would suspect it actually is quite common

> The two other use cases you mention aren’t common at all though.

based on which data? Drag-dropping links to other applications is quite useful.

We'll, lets hope most users of this do indeed load it from your domain, so my scriptblocker will stop it.

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